Octopus Alibi

by Tom Corcoran

  “Let’s go in the church,” I said. “We can stand together, then go to my house, talk this out.”

  Lewis looked toward Marnie. “The three of us?”

  I said, “I don’t know why not.”

  Lewis’s face muscles relaxed. “Let’s go.”

  Marnie said nothing but clasped my upper arm as I led her through the door. Just as we feared, standing room only. But the air was cool, and the one-page program mercifully short. It took me a minute to find Teresa. She was in the second row with a group of city employees.

  The service went quickly. Someone, wanting to illustrate Steve Gomez’s eclectic tastes in art and music, noted that, among his effects, friends found tickets to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that was two weeks away. Someone said, “I’ll take them,” a little too loudly. A round of laughter broke out.

  Marnie leaned to my ear. “Give me a nickel for every ounce of perfume in here.” I felt relief in her finding a moment of humor, too.

  Two men I figured for blatant self-promotion surprised me with heartfelt talks. A city employee spoke about bosses who care for the people who look to them for leadership. A neighbor thanked Gomez for keeping a magnificent yard, for raising property values. The lieutenant governor of Florida spoke to Steve’s fighting for state-assisted school funding and his skill in landing grants for civic improvements.

  For some reason my thoughts went to Naomi Douglas. It began when an unthinking bastard said, “Only the good die young.” Wouldn’t Naomi love to hear that one? Had dying old made her a worse person? Who kept score?

  The ceremony was ending when Bobbi Lewis checked her watch. She slipped a piece of paper into my shirt pocket and said, “I’ll call you later.” She nodded good-bye to Marnie, then opened the church door and walked out to the sunshine.

  Marnie reached for my hand, gave it a squeeze.

  18

  WE HAD BEEN LAST to enter, we were first out. I wanted to think that, in reversed circumstances, Steve Gomez would make the same dash. Given the choice, I wouldn’t go to my funeral, either.

  Marnie looked revived by the speeches and prayers. She saw a city clerk she thought might give her background on the Mallory Dome. She told me to walk home without her. I promised to change her tire if it was flat.

  I saw no sign of Lewis or Bohner. My sit-down and quack about the ATM was on hold. I could only point my finger at Randolph, and had no proof but a cabbie without a name. My best hope was that Whit would try the bogus card again, show his smile to the camera.

  I walked a few yards up Pinder Lane to check out the slip of paper in my shirt pocket. Lewis had given me the license tag info that Sam had needed. The green Chevy Cavalier didn’t belong to a private snoop. It was registered to Odin A. Marlow of Pembroke Pines. Lewis had tagged on additional data. Detective Marlow also owned a new Cadillac Eldorado and a twenty-three-foot Fountain Sportfish CC. Not a bad lifestyle for a cop, though I needed to remember that he had inherited a watch, too. The Toyota belonged to Barry Marcantonio, brother of the other missing woman. Sam had said he was from Beaufort, South Carolina, but the street address for his Florida tag was in Dania Beach.

  A second home, or had he moved south to search for his sister?

  I hurried out to William Street, got Marnie’s attention, gave her the slip of paper, and began to walk home on Fleming. I had thirty-five minutes to make my flight, but I had a strong feeling that Grand Cayman was not in the cards.

  Walking to the church, Marnie and I had seen Old Island funky sights. Hurrying back to the house, I faced a new version. A woman in a halter top and spray-on biking shorts waxed a new Acura from Nebraska. A block farther, two men in tennis attire unloaded hanging bags from a Volvo in front of a bed-and-breakfast. Colorado plates on that one. A commuter plane scraped the rooftops of Old Town, inbound with off-season tourists. Someone wanted to widen roads at the top of the Keys. How about one narrow, bumpy lane heading south and three wide smooth ones outbound?

  I checked my watch again. In theory, I had time to catch the plane, if a cab showed inside of a minute and I didn’t brush my teeth. My cross-lane neighbor, Hector Ayusa, waved from the glider on his shady porch. After all these years, I wasn’t sure I would recognize him without his tank top and suit trousers, the unlit cigar in his mouth. Seeing Hector, and having passed the old barber shop with its striped pole a block away, I had returned to old Key West, at least in spirit.

  Marnie’s tire was flat. My spirits went neutral.

  “Yo, bubba,” called Hector. “You got a boy come see you. He checking out your house. He check me out checking him, and he go.”

  “You ever see this boy before, Hector?”

  Hector nodded, serious and mean. “Hot rod, color of a school bus. Other day he drove away with your woman.”

  Randolph had come by during the funeral?

  “I’m ready to let him have her,” I said.

  Hector looked toward Fleming. “Be better off.”

  I went in, picked up the phone, heard five quick beeps. The introduction to “Gimme Some Lovin’,” the old hit by Spencer Davis Group. One message, from Matt, the account executive at the Sarasota ad agency. Matt told me not to worry if I had trouble with my flight. “We found Casey Hample here on Grand Cayman. He can do the first two days’ work for us. You can pick up from there.”

  Casey was a dork and drunk who would ruin the job. I had been fired.

  I needed to buy common stock in my premonitions.

  The envelope on my kitchen counter yanked me back to current events. It held the prints of my Gomez scene photos, a set of prints from the cop’s underwater camera, and another, smaller envelope on which “six exp.” was written with a Sharpie. Marnie had been crying when I returned from seeing Duffy Lee Hall and Dr. Lysak. She had distracted me, and I had forgotten to look through the Kodak Max prints. I found six prints in the “six exp.” bag, and one clear plastic strip that held their negatives.

  The first two depicted a white-flowered stephanotis. The sun’s direction made me think that the vine was near Naomi’s back door. I didn’t recognize that part of Naomi’s yard, but I wouldn’t know small spaces in my own yard at quick glance. The next picture baffled me. It was a tiny cactus, a miniature of one you might see in Arizona Highways. I would have noticed that one in her yard.

  What baffled me more was the poor framing, the odd angles. Most of the prints I had seen in Naomi’s office had been skillfully shot, close to their subjects, but not too close, and without confusing backgrounds. These failed to use sunlight to best advantage. Highlights were few, contrast was flat.

  The final three had been snapped in front of Naomi’s house, looking up Grinnell toward the harbor. They were afternoon shots, by the shadows, with purple and gray thunderclouds in the distance. I was surprised by their sharpness. Throw-away cameras use plastic lenses, not famous for crisp images.

  So much for clues.

  I went to the bathroom for a leak and quality thinking time. Three things came to mind. I wished I had bought the 28-millimeter Olympus lens from Cootie Ortega. I flashed on the hairy look Dexter Hayes had given me on his way into church. And I mentally revisited the small cactus. I sensed that I’d seen it before.

  I pulled the prints from the larger envelope, the copies of the boat team cop’s and mine. I looked first at Steve Gomez’s body slumped with blood on the shirt. I leafed through my shots and finally found one that showed the cactus. The next print showed the stephanotis vine.

  Problem solved. The first three from Naomi’s Max had been taken in Steve Gomez’s yard. Again, I scanned the last three Max shots. They were level and better-composed than the garden photos. A reasonable man would suspect that the Max had belonged to Gomez, that Gomez had been a klutz with a camera, and he had taken the first three images before giving the camera to Naomi. She had done a fine job of framing her photographs. But I couldn’t guess what was so damned interesting about Grinnell Street.

  I used my four-inch magnifyin
g glass to study the street-scene shots. In the first, a fat orange cat darted between two parked cars. Someone had knocked over a recycling bin. The gas filler door of a Subaru was ajar. That kind of stuff could change the world. The next picture was shot from fifty feet farther north. I could see the front fender of the Subaru and … three cars ahead of it, parked at an odd angle, a yellow Z-3 roadster. I looked back at the first shot. I could barely see the Z-3. I checked the third street shot. Clear as hell, and Whit Randolph’s car for certain. Had Naomi intentionally aimed her shot to include the BMW’s license tag?

  * * *

  I pedaled to Greene Street, locked the bike in front of a small gift shop. The store’s display racks were filled with pottery, carvings, custom-glazed tiles, glass sculpture, and porcelain picture frames. A small silver-haired woman tended the counter.

  “Let me know if I can help you find something,” she said.

  “My name is Rutledge. I was a friend of Naomi Douglas.”

  The woman broke into tears. She was the woman Naomi’s neighbor had mentioned, the one with whom Naomi had shared high-priced wine.

  I tried to apologize, but scoped her business license while she dried her eyes. Her name was Cristina Alcroft.

  She recovered quickly. “I try not to dwell on it,” she said. “Naomi was so worried about Steven, and then she died.”

  “Steven?”

  She nodded, “The mayor. He told her he felt threatened. Then he died the same day, supposedly by his own hand. You’re the photographer friend.”

  “I am. Did she say why the mayor felt threatened?”

  “Bad elements were pushing for certain votes on city legislation. That’s not her exact wording, of course.”

  “Please, I’m not a policeman. But I share your concern about sudden deaths. Let me ask this. Did the Mallory Dome or the art museum worry Mayor Gomez?”

  She cracked a sad smile. “The dome worried Naomi. Steven said that was a joke, not a problem. The art museum proposal, Steven had what he called ‘hidden support’ on that one. No, the proposal that worried him was that island development near the top of Cow Key Channel. He told Naomi that he wasn’t old enough to drive when the city first approved it. All these years later, with its value and graft potential, he had bad feelings about it.”

  “Has anyone from law enforcement come to talk to you?”

  “I tried to talk to the police. They weren’t interested. I called four times, and nothing. No one would talk to me. At this point, I don’t think I could get a parking ticket.”

  “You say ‘police,’ you mean the city, right?”

  “Of course.”

  I gave her my phone number and asked her to keep in touch.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been meaning … But this is not the time.”

  “For what, ma’am?”

  “I would be honored to sell your fine-art photography in this shop. This is something we should talk about another day.”

  * * *

  I parked my bike next to the Green Parrot Bar on Whitehead and fought the urge to chug a noon beer. What would I do with a noon beer? Celebrate my lost job, two dead people, or the flat tire I forgot to fix? I wanted to show up unannounced, ask questions faster than he could whip up lies. I wanted to read his face, see how he lived.

  I hoofed it two blocks to the condo and knocked. His BMW basked in its spot under the acacia tree. Randolph answered the door quickly. He clasped a Slim Jim in his teeth like a bandito with a cigarillo, held a cell phone tightly to his ear. I thought maybe he was trying to wedge it into his brain. He wore a bleached shark’s tooth on a gold chain around his neck, a black Harley T-shirt, and lime-green surfer jams. I noticed for the first time that he was out of proportion, a big head with narrow shoulders. I doubted that he played sports in high school or college. He lifted his hand, motioned that he’d be off the phone soon, and patted the fridge, offered me a noon beer. Celebrate my two trashed art photos, or Sam’s dead sister?

  Randolph found his remote clicker, pressed the button. His TV flickered on, tuned to the Cartoon Channel. He wandered to a patio, stood just outside the door. I assumed the TV sound was to mask his conversation. Most of his end was grunting anyway. I heard him say, “Look at it from someone else’s point of view,” and, “Quit jumping to judgment.”

  I leaned against the hallway wall and looked around. I had walked into a textbook bachelor’s pad. On the kitchen counter were a key ring with about ten keys, a mound of coins, crumpled ones and fives, and two bar napkins with scrawled felt-tip notes. In his upside-down ball cap were his wallet, a roll of Tums, and his sunglasses. His kitchen trash bin was full of Styrofoam take-out boxes. Empty bottles lined the sink. Among the dead Heinekens, Randolph’s choice, were two empty Miller Lites. Teresa’s brand for the rare times she drank beer.

  Randolph had scribbled notes on paper scraps, grocery bags, and junk mail. In the scramble of his business day, no surface was safe. There had to be fifteen Post-it notes sticking out of the phone book. I opened up to one in the Key West section. Small world, small island. He’d flagged the listing for Y. Gomez. No street address, no mention of Love Lane, but the phone number was listed.

  Whit lived clean. Fresh underwear spilled from a large black plastic bag, probably from the Margaret Truman Launderette. Ten or twelve starched long-sleeved shirts hung in a plastic bag, and loose hangers were strewn about. A lightweight camouflage jacket was tossed over the back of a chair. This was the mess of someone in constant motion, the realm of fast arrivals and exits.

  I had expected rent-a-condo furniture and wall art. Teresa had told me that she had rented an air-conditioned storage pod, but her furnishings were right where they’d always been. She had loaned or sold them to Randolph, with the addition of a fifteen-foot sisal runner in the hallway. It was identical in texture to one in Naomi’s home. Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall seeing Naomi’s sisal rug since her death. I walked off the length of this one. Too long to fit in Naomi’s place, but an odd coincidence.

  Newspapers covered the couch. I pushed some aside, sat, and checked them out. It wasn’t just today’s paper with the Gomez spread, but previous papers going back at least a week, open to photos of local luminaries. Many included a young city commissioner posing with anyone doing anything. Flamboyant as a spring garden, he had become the island’s unofficial greeter. Most surprising was the day-old copy of Investors Business Daily open to a page that listed IBD’s “Ten Secrets to Success.” Randolph had placed a check mark beside item three, “Take Action.” Next to it, a brochure entitled “Meet … Key West” showed pictures of the Prudential real-estate sales force, brokers and realtors. Again Post-it notes, not marking properties, but selected inch-square color portraits. Why was he pinpointing successful people? Why was he in a photograph with the mayor? He had mentioned investors …

  Randolph hurried inside, tossed his cell phone onto a chair, and waved me into the kitchen. He did a double take on the open Prudential brochure, checked my face for an instant, then kept going. By the time I caught up with him, he had set out a can of Planter’s cashew nuts, placed a spoon in an open pint of Häagen-Dazs, opened a cold beer for me, and was pouring beer into a tumbler half-full of tomato juice. Hell, I thought. If this guy wasn’t a worm, a probable thief, and a lady stealer, he’d be a wonderful roommate.

  “None of that wussy health food for you,” I said.

  “I do what I like, I eat what I like.”

  “And, Lord help us if a rule gets in the way.”

  He nodded. “Alex, you get HBO?”

  “Nope.”

  “You old cheapskate. It only costs a few extra bucks a month.”

  “Money down the drain. I don’t have a TV.”

  He looked at me like I had just told him my parents had shot each other, my siblings were killed in a car-train wreck on the same day, and my house had burned down.

  “No TV?” he said. “How do you get the news?”

  “Put my ear to th
e ground. I overhear talk in bars.”

  “No movies?”

  “Redundant. I live in Key West.”

  A strange look came over him. “You came by to talk cholesterol, Alex?” He smiled, but I could have cut a diamond on his teeth. “Or have you been worrying? You think I’m going to leave a permanent mark on your girlfriend? You think I’m going to force her to lick my shoe? Do something with her that you haven’t tried yet?”

  “I never thought I could run her life,” I said. “Until a few days ago I was happy to have her be part of mine.”

  He lifted his beer-juice concoction in mock toast. “So you’ve come by to punch me in the eye?”

  “If I did that, your eye would heal in five days. The broken bones in my hand would never be right.”

  “That’s good, Rutledge. I admire a man who plans his actions, compares upside and downside. Ah, shit.” He grabbed a paper towel, poked it at the countertop. “These ants are commandos. They come out of the walls and attack. You don’t even see them coming, and I hate the stink of bug bombs.” Now he grinned, for real. “It might poison my health food.”

  “Squirt them with Windex and wipe it up,” I said. “Kills the little fuckers, you wind up with a clean kitchen.”

  “I’ll do it. Why’d you come here, Rutledge?”

  “You mean come to Key West?”

  “No,” he said, “but that’s good for a start. How did you wind up in this tropical hellhole?”

  “I came down for the weekend, twenty-five years ago.”

  “Clever line, but it’s not yours. I heard the dude sing that song the other night.”

  “It’s a line worth repeating,” I said. “So why come to our quiet island in the sun? What’s your agenda?”

  “My pace the last few years, I would describe as hectic. I’ve come to the tropics for therapeutic boredom.”

  “You here to stay?”

  “You did, didn’t you?” he said. “They got visitation rules now, or do you just wish they did?”

  “I got to stay because I didn’t fuck up. I didn’t get my name known to the cops for petty shit. I didn’t give anybody an excuse to invite me out of town on short notice.”